Given as one of the plenaries at the Council for Writing Program Administration conference in 2015, this revised-for-print article weaves a tale about the good and bad sustainability practices in technical infrastructures within rhetoric and composition studies.

This article provides a preview of Vega, a new scholarly publishing platform in development (set to be released in late 2017). With twenty-plus years of experience publishing scholarly multimedia in the journal Kairos, the author summarizes editorial practices for multimedia content in terms of the scholarly, social, and technical infrastructures required to sustain digital media-rich publishing venues. Vega is an outgrowth of those practices that aims to provide a stable platform for training editors, publishers, and authors in how to create, edit, and maintain the scholarly record.

abstract:Scholarly publications are a primary means for researchers in any field to foster and support a shared discourse. As design researchers debate what forms their scholarship might take, this author suggests looking to examples from other, transdisciplinary academic fields that have long traditions in publishing designed research, or scholarship that enacts its argument through design. The author offers cases of several online journals in the sciences, arts, and humanities that publish designed research of various types, including one example from digital writing studies, which shares design researchers’ interests in collaborative, process-based, rhetorical practices. By considering alternative modes of publishing design research through designed research, the shared discourses of scholarly practice can serve as a pedagogical site of knowledge-building for the field.

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This article provides some historical, institutional, and theoretical context for a multimodal pedagogy, as taught by the three authors in three different universities, which forms the basis for their guidebook, Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects.

This article examines how an online, scholarly journal, Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy mentors authors to revise their webtexts (interactive, digital media scholarship) for publication. Using an editorial pedagogy, in which multimodal and rhetorical genre theories are merged with revision techniques found in process-based composition studies, the author describes how webtexts are collaboratively peer-reviewed in Kairos and authors are provided macro- and micro-level revision suggestions for their scholarly multimedia.

This article picks up, literally, where another one leaves off: “Assessing Scholarly Multimedia: A Rhetorical Genre-Studies Approach” in Technical Communication Quarterly (Ball, 2012). In that article, I describe how I have brought my editorial-mentoring work with Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which exclusively publishes “born digital” media-rich scholarship, into undergraduate and graduate writing classes. This article describes how the process of editorial peer-review translates into students’ peer-review workshops in those same writing classes.

This article describes what scholarly multimedia (i.e., webtexts) are and how one teacher-editor has students compose these texts as part of an assignment sequence in her writing classes. The article shows how one set of assessment criteria for scholarly multimedia—based on the Institute for Multimedia Literacy’s parameters (see Kuhn, Johnson, & Lopez, 2010) for assessing honor students’ multimedia projects—are used to give formative feedback to students’ projects.

abstractIn May 2007, the Department of English at Utah State University (USU) redesigned its computer lab to increase mobility and collaboration during writing projects. Our study shows that despite the Professional and Technical Communication (PTC) field’s efforts to promote writing as a socially active, collaborative practice, many students view computer labs as spaces for conducting isolated, single-authored work. In this article, we discuss how a combination of movable furniture and mobile technology, including wireless access and laptops, can enhance student collaboration in group-based writing assignments. The lab included both desktop and laptop seating areas, so the authors created a modified worksite analysis designed to evaluate team collaboration in this new layout. These material changes in the lab allow students to configure the space according to their needs, offering them some measure of control over three crucial elements of successful collaboration: formality, presence, and confidentiality.

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Authors of new media texts regularly draw on both scholarly and creative genres to construct their arguments. In so doing, they bridge disciplinary boundaries that have split English departments in the past. These boundaries are discussed in our text using the following binaries: high :: low, literature :: composition, and popular :: academic discourse. In this article, we examine, then complicate, the binary form :: content through a popular and academic YouTube video (Wesch, 2007). We then situate new media texts within the historical split between rhetoric and literature using Berlin’s social epistemic rhetoric as a bridge. Our argument concludes by showing that new media texts can provide a convergence between binaries in English studies, particularly the one found in tenure guidelines suggesting that research is either scholarly or creative. New media is both/and.

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This webtext demonstrates the possibilities of using new media to teach students critical literacy skills applicable to the 21st century. It is a manifesto for what we think writing scholars should be teaching in general-education “writing” classes like first-year composition. In order to answer the question of what we should teach, we have to ask what kinds of academic literacy, if any, we value. We argue here that rhetorical theory is a productive way to theorize how meaning is made among new media texts, their designers, and their readers. We use the Ancient Greek concepts of topoi and commonplace to explain how designers and readers enter into a space of negotiated meaning-making when converging upon new media texts. That negotiated space offers a new-media space for learning critical literacies by means other than research papers. As examples, we discuss two student texts and the literacies they demonstrate.